In his article in The New Yorker James Wood makes the completely crazy, lovable, probably somehow true comparison of Keith Moon to Glenn Gould: “I often think of Moon and Glenn Gould together, notwithstanding their great differences. Both started performing very young . . .; both were idiosyncratic, revolutionary performers, for whom spontaneity was an important element . . . ; both had exuberant, pantomimic fantasy lives . . . ; both were gregarious yet essentially solitary; neither man practiced much . . . ; and all their performance tics . . . have the slightly desperate quality of mania. The performance behind the instrument, however, has the joyous freedom of true escape and self-dissolution: Gould becomes the piano, Moon becomes the drums.” This is kind of like comparing Dr. Jekyl to Mr. Hyde – so exactly wrong it’s totally right.

At preschool Mom had quoted a line that she and Billy heard a musicologist say, “Whenever I hear The Who, I remember that freedom is possible,” which a preschooler quoted back to her a few days later as: “Freeness is always the truth.”